


If Thou Be Able to Number Them

by ehmazing



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 15:15:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehmazing/pseuds/ehmazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of lighthouses that weren't opened.</p><p>[Major spoilers, obviously.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Thou Be Able to Number Them

Anna DeWitt is six months old but half as heavy as she should be. Her father hires an Irishwoman to nurse her but Anna is still pale and thin and sluggish. Her lungs are weak and she cries too softly, too meakly, and her father hates hearing her. He hates that her sad little shrieks make him want to end her misery.

Lutece offers experimental medicines, new remedies he insists no average doctor could use properly. Booker is out of money and when he watches the nurse try to feed Anna, too tired to take her breast, he knows he is running short on time.

So he agrees. It will be better this way, for them both.

Lutece arrives promptly in the morning and Booker points him toward the nursery, keeping to his desk in the hopes that if he doesn’t move, he won’t have to say goodbye. It was bad enough to rock her to sleep the night before, listening to her shallow, ragged breathing as he hummed a lullaby.

“DeWitt! What’s the meaning of this?”

Booker looks up and Lutece is holding a rag doll in Anna’s dress, head and limbs lolling limply at its sides. He opens his mouth to say that he has no idea, he thought Anna was there but she’s probably at the O’Neil’s next-door, Mrs. O’Neil might’ve taken Anna over earlier so that she could watch her and her own children--

“We had a deal!” Lutece shouts furiously as he plops the doll down on his desk. Booker looks at its skinny arms and flat belly, and as he picks it up he remembers that Anna doesn’t have any dolls.

It’s better this way, for them both.

* * *

Anna DeWitt is five years old and she has just watched a man die. He was clinging to her windowsill, hammering against the glass with his fists. She had hidden behind her playhouse, hands clamped over her ears, trying to press out every dull thud. 

But Songbird came, and she is safe now.

She crawls out when Songbird says that it’s done. He looks like a giant, sprawled across her floor, his broad chest heaving up and down. There are pools of red spreading across the carpet and it gets between her toes as she walks through it, thick and sticky. One of Songbird’s talons is sticking out from his stomach, just like the paper flags in the sandcastles in her picture books. It makes wet, squelching noises when she tries to pull it out.

She jumps when the man’s eyes open, but Songbird coos **It’s alright, he won’t hurt you, come away from there now**. But she lingers there, peering at the man’s face, poking at his chin with her fingers.

“Anna?” he hisses, and she says, “No, my name’s Elizabeth,” but he keeps saying it. Anna, Anna, Anna. Songbird moves to make him stop and she yells, waving him away.

“Okay,” she tells the man. “I’ll be Anna.”

It is ages before his eyes close, before his chest caves in like her blanket tents do when she knocks them over. She picks up one of his large, heavy arms and lets it drop. Blood splatters over his hand when it hits the soaked carpet. There are letters stenciled onto his skin. She traces them with the tip of her thimble.

When she’s finished, Songbird picks him up in one hand and tosses him from the balcony.

 **Time for bed, Elizabeth** , he says with the tilt of his head and one little trill, but she’s already run to her desk and dipped her finger in ink to copy the shapes onto her own hand.

“No it’s not, and I’m not Elizabeth!” She runs from the room, Songbird in hot pursuit. “I’m Anna, Anna, Anna!”

* * *

Anna DeWitt is thirteen years old and as far she’s concerned, she’s been an orphan her whole life. Her file says that she was brought to St. Christine’s Home for Girls as an infant; her mother died giving birth. Her father hasn’t been seen since. Anna was disappointed that that was all the file said; she had broken the locks on the matron’s study door to get to it, and it just told her things she already knew.

What she had hoped to find were answers as to _what_ she is, not who. The birth certificate said “Anna DeWitt” but there was nothing about her mother being able to see through gray holes in the air or her father having a knack for opening the bathroom door and suddenly finding himself on a beach surrounded by oddly-dressed bathers. She hears weird music at night and sometimes she finds strange objects replacing her hairbrush or her stockings. The matron thinks she steals them, and of all the girls in the home, Anna is the one most likely to be found sitting on the punishment stool in the corner.

She is also the least likely to be adopted. But, the matron grunts to her before Mr. and Mrs. Lutece usher her into their automobile, God works in mysterious ways.

The Luteces are--in a word--odd. Anna wonders if they met and married because they look so much alike, or if they’ve been married so long that they’ve morphed into one another. They receive her with very little fanfare. In fact, they adopted her before even meeting her.

“But why me?” Anna had asked the matron.

“That’s what I said,” the matron grumbled, “but they insisted on you.”

Now, squashed between them in the front seat, Anna is practically bursting with questions. Mr. Lutece is humming a tune she can’t place while he drives, and Mrs. Lutece is hidden behind a large book. Anna can make out _\--vanced Mathematical Theorems of Temporal Displacement_ on the cover.

“Is it good?” Anna gestures to the tome.

“Not at all,” Mrs. Lutece sniffs.

“Oh. …But, if it’s bad, why are you reading it?”

“I never said it was bad. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are relative terms used to categorize literature to reflect what society deems tasteful.” Mrs. Lutece licks her finger to turn the page. “If you limit yourself to fitting everything into a dichotomy, you’ll never be able to reconcile your worldviews when confronted with something that can’t be clearly defined.

“But,” she says, dog-earing the corner, “it _is_ rather dry.”

Well then. Anna resolves not to inquire anything from Mrs. Lutece in the future, if she can help it. She turns to Mr. Lutece instead, who seems at least more agreeable.

“So, Father, where are we going?”

“Good heavens, girl, don’t call him that!” Mrs. Lutece groans. “God spare me from ever having children.”

 _Then why go to the trouble to adopt one?_ Anna wants to ask, but instead she says, “Er, alright, but what should I call the two of you?”

Mr. Lutece chirps, “Uncle Robert!” at the same time that Mrs. Lutece says, “ _Doctor_ Lutece.” They argue about this for a few blocks--Doctor Lutece insists she will be no one’s “Auntie” and you don’t know what it’s like to be a woman with a degree in this day and age, Robert, you, a man, can call yourself “Doctor” and everyone will be impressed but people give my diploma the same respect as they do a gum wrapper on the sidewalk, I take pride in my education, thank you. Anna waits, dumbfounded, until Uncle Robert is back to humming and Doctor Lutece is buried in her book once more.

“Right, uh, Uncle Robert, where are we going?”

“I don’t know!” he answers, smiling, “but my, I’m excited to get there!”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course not, dear. I have absolutely no idea where your father is now, but I can guarantee that one way or another, we’ll catch up to him.”

The automobile hurtles over a pothole and Anna is thrown into the air for a moment before falling back down onto the leather seat with a thump.

“What?” Her head is reeling. “Do you know my father? Is that why you came, did he send you to get me? Does he want to take me back?”

“Yes, no, and to be determined,” Doctor Lutece rattles off. “No more questions, please, I’ve started this paragraph five times over now thanks to your chattering.”

Uncle Robert winks at her. “Sorry, dear!” To Anna, “Don’t trouble yourself about it. We’ll explain everything in time.”

Anna bites her lip. “Just one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“That song you’re humming. Where did you hear it?”

Uncle Robert grins.

“Don’t worry. You’ll get all of your answers. We’ll certainly see to that.”

* * *

Anna DeWitt is seventeen years old and she’s found her true calling. She found it soon after the Vox found her, shivering in a gutter under the wharf. She still has fresh scars from her escape because they’re always a shortage on bandages in the slums. There are a lot of shortages in the slums, though there is always a surplus of misery.

Daisy Fitzroy said, “The Vox helped you, and now the Vox need your help,” and Anna didn't need to be asked twice.

She teaches children to read and write and do a little math in between their work shifts; there are late night classes for the adults. When she first arrived even Daisy couldn’t write her own name, but now the children can decode messages and a few gunsmiths are using her chemistry lessons to experiment with. She is happy to give back. After all, the Vox, the slums, they give her purpose. They give her food and blankets and plenty of voxophones and history books, showed her the truth about Father Comstock and his great farce of a city. They give her shelter from the patrols. They give her a reason to stay alive.

And because there are still men hunting down Elizabeth, they give her a new name.

“Anna,” Daisy says, looking at her over the fire. “My mother’s name was Anna.”

“What about a last name? I don’t have one.”

“Hmm.” Daisy polishes her rifle in long strokes, brow furrowed. “How’s DeWitt? Knew a DeWitt once, a pilgrim. Came to the city years ago and was mowed down his first day even, tryin’ to save a man from the stocks. Nobody’ll remember DeWitt.”

Anna touches her own gun through her coat, feeling the weight press against her side. 

“They will when we’re through with them.”

* * *

Anna DeWitt is nine years old and she is not allowed to ride the hot air balloon at the World’s Fair. She stamps her foot and whines and begs and bargains but her father says, “Are you going to behave and ride the carousel with me, or am I gonna have to eat all of this cotton candy by myself?”

She waits a while before trying again and her father sighs, “Anna, you know I don’t like those contraptions, they’re not safe.” She points out the workmen holding the ropes below and the pilot in the basket and he counters, “And how will they help if you lean too far over the edge and fall, hmm? Now finish your peanuts.”

Her last resort is to catch his sleeve when they pass it en route to the souvenir stand and make the face she knows he hates, the one where she lets her eyes tear up a little and her nose scrunch up, but Booker DeWitt has fought tougher battles than this one.

“Listen,” her father says, bending down to her, “I’ll make you a deal: if you skip the hot-air balloon today, I promise that when you’re older, I’ll take you to Paris.”

She pretends to consider it.

“Will you let me climb the Eiffel Tower?”

“Yes.”

“All the way to the top?”

“As high as you can go.”

She narrows her eyes.

“And you really, really promise?”

“Now Anna DeWitt, when have I ever gone back on a promise?”

Her father shakes her hand too hard, like he always does, but she squeezes back with all her might.


End file.
